Failed Experiment

So I recently came into my old comic book collection, i.e. my parents asked me take the comics languishing in the basement back to apartment.

Being who I am, I of course decided to try to catalog them! Again, being who I am…I thought I’d try something kind of ridiculous — and it didn’t really work.

I thought I’d try out Bibframe. Without the editor. In XML. Myself.

Why? It’s not even done yet! There aren’t even really expressions yet! What the heck is an instance?

Fine. You’re right. I shouldn’t’ve. I’ve just been looking for a project, they always say, y’know, ‘they’ that if you want to “learn to code” you should have a project.

So the project is: Catalog and display (on the internet) my comic book collection.

I didn’t want to use MARCXML because frankly, MARC is the past, blah blah blah, future of linked data blah blah blah. So I bit off more than I could chew by attempting Bibframe. I’m going to back up a couple steps.

Not wanting to re-invent the wheel though, I looked for existing metadata standards. Here’s two that I’m interested in:

The former, Comic Book Markup Language is pretty cool, and definitely worth a read-through if you’re into that kind of thing. It’s essentially a TEI (text encoding initiative) extension. It adds some comic-book specific elements and attributes to the TEI set to better describe the medium. It’s also REALLY granular. Way more granular than what I’m looking for! The implication of its use is that you want panel-by-panel description, whereas I’m more interested in a broader bibliographic description. It’s still something I’ll be checking out though, maybe at a future date. It would definitely be fun to encode some classic like, Spider-Man #50 in CBML.

The latter is a lot less involved and more what I’m looking for, so I think I’ll be giving it a try. Will report back!

For those interested in the bonkers mess I made: here’s a fun excerpt…

Note that I was just working on a single comic, Batman 236, as my test case. I will note that this is valid RDF, so that’s nice.